Hating the New

Are Joe Queenan's Ears on Wrong?

By

Terry Teachout

Updated July 19, 2008 11:59 p.m. ET

If you've ever squirmed through a concert of what a composer I know calls "crunch-and-thump music," you'll likely feel a twinge of sympathy when you read "Admit It, You're as Bored as I Am," the slash-and-burn attack on contemporary classical music that Joe Queenan published last week in the Guardian (http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/ story /0,,2289751,00.html). Mr. Queenan, a music-loving humorist known for his disinclination to suffer fools, has finally decided to admit, both to himself and to the public at large, that he doesn't like modern music -- any kind of modern music, so far as I can gather from his piece, which is a bit on the unspecific side. Still, it isn't hard to catch Mr. Queenan's drift from his description of "The Minotaur," a new opera by Harrison Birtwistle, which he calls "harsh and ugly and monotonous and generically apocalyptic. . . the same funereal caterwauling that bourgeoisie-loathing composers have been churning out since the 1930s."

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I haven't heard "The Minotaur," though I doubt I'd like it any more than Mr. Queenan did. I don't go in for crunch-and-thump music, nor do I care for the over-and-over-and-over-again minimalism of John Adams and Philip Glass, which puts me to sleep. But Mr. Queenan is gunning for bigger game. "A hundred years after Schoenberg," he writes, "the public still doesn't like anything after 'Transfigured Night,' and even that is a stretch. . . . I consider myself to be the kind of listener contemporary composers would need to reach if they had any hope of achieving a breakthrough. So far, this has not happened, and I doubt that it will."

Mr. Queenan's jeremiad will have a familiar ring to those who recall "The Agony of Modern Music," a book in which Henry Pleasants, a CIA agent turned music critic (no, I didn't make that up), said much the same thing. "Serious music is a dead art," Pleasants wrote. "The vein which for 300 years offered a seemingly inexhaustible yield of beautiful music has run out. What we know as modern music is the noise by deluded speculators picking through its slag pile."

Pleasants' book came out in 1955, but if I'm reading "Admit It, You're as Bored as I Am" correctly, Mr. Queenan believes that nothing has changed since then.

That's quite a stretch. Schoenberg's "Verkl&auml;rte Nacht," Mr. Queenan's landmark of musical likability, was written in 1899. If we are to take him literally, everything composed after that date belongs in the same garbage can as "The Minotaur," including such accessible and appealing works as Benjamin Britten's "Ceremony of Carols," Aaron Copland's "Billy the Kid," Maurice Ravel's G Major Piano Concerto, Dmitri Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, Igor Stravinsky's "Symphony of Psalms" and Ralph Vaughan Williams's "Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis." That I don't buy, not for a minute.

It would appear that Mr. Queenan has booked a cabin in the same boat as Paul Johnson, the author of "Modern Times," who in 2003 published a violently opinionated, immensely stimulating book called "Art: A New History" in which he declared that modern art was no damn good, period. Mr. Johnson did have a few nice things to say about Edward Hopper and Norman Rockwell, but that was about it. Such clean-sweep rejectionism puts me in mind of "The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold," a novel written by Evelyn Waugh in 1957. Pinfold, Waugh's grumpy alter ego, detested everything the modern world had to offer: "His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz -- everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime."

I don't feel that way, but I think I know what it would be like to feel that way. Since there is, after all, so much about the modern era that is loathsome, why not simply loathe it all and be done with it? This seems to be the motive underlying Mr. Queenan's repudiation of modern music. "It is not composers' fault," he writes, "that they wrote uncompromising music that was a direct response to the violence and stupidity of the 20th century; but it is not my fault that I would rather listen to Bach. That's my way of responding to the violence and stupidity of the 20th century, and the 21st century as well." I sympathize, but I've never been able to reject the evidence of my senses, which tell me that Stravinsky was a great composer (usually) and Picasso a great painter (sometimes). For me, pretending otherwise would be a pose, and I don't like poseurs.

Needless to say, poseurs come in different shades. Some assume the role of super-hip neophiles, while others play at being Pinfold-style neophobes. I doubt, however, that Joe Queenan is the latter, and I appreciate his plain-spoken refusal to doff his hat respectfully to that which he loathes. "All amateurs must be philistines part of the time," Kingsley Amis once wrote. "Must be: a greater sin is to be coerced into showing respect when little or none is felt."

But if Mr. Queenan really, truly doesn't like any modern music at all, then all I can say is that I wish he'd think again. The century of modernism may have been bloody and ugly, but it was also full of beauty, and those who insist on closing their eyes and ears to it -- whatever their reasons may be -- are missing out on more than they know.

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